Melvin Hunt is the best thing that could have happened to the Nuggets, which, of course, means he’s also one of the worst.

He’s too good. They’re winning too often. Keep this up, and they’ll get the 12th pick in the draft.

“These guys, they are reaching inside themselves and they are pulling things out of themselves that they didn’t even know they had,” Hunt said after another bonkers win, this one in double overtime Sunday night in New Orleans, in which Anthony Davis’ stat line looked like something out of the video game NBA Jam.

When Hunt replaced the fired Brian Shaw and became the Nuggets’ interim coach last month, it was a move to essentially keep the team from revolting. The Nuggets had lost 19 of their previous 21 games.

Once Hunt took over, the Nuggets became a new team. Denver is 6-3 under Hunt after a 92-81 loss Monday night at Memphis. As the Nuggets rise in the standings, though, they are falling in the all-important draft lottery standings.

Hunt couldn’t and shouldn’t care about which first-round draft pick the Nuggets get. He has a revival on his hands. The spirit of basketball is back. Denver’s moody role players are now rolling against good teams. The fun is back.

After all of this, though, imagine if 11 teams end up worse than these Nuggets?

In the lottery standings, Denver entered play Monday in eighth “place,” if you will, with the eighth-best chance of nabbing the top pick (2.8 percent) and eighth-best chance of landing in the top three (10 percent). But with each victory, they keep “slipping.” Mathematically it’s possible that Denver could drop to 12th. But with some normal Nuggets-y play (Shaw ball, if you will), Denver could rise as high as sixth, which would give them a 21.5 percent chance at landing in the top three (not bad!) and a 6.3 percent shot at No. 1.

But Melvin Hunt is in the way. He keeps the Nuggets playing hard and playing to win, and he’s making the jobs of Denver executives harder — both in regard to getting a high draft pick and hiring a coach. They have to give him serious consideration, right?

“As an organization, we have all been impressed with the job Melvin has done thus far,” general manager Tim Connelly said by phone Monday. “When the season concludes, he will be one of the candidates as we begin an exhaustive search to find a head coach.”

There’s so much to like about Hunt. I remember when he first joined the Nuggets, in the fall of 2010, he got along so swimmingly with Carmelo Anthony that we joked that, of all people, this no-name assistant could be the reason Melo decided to stay in Denver. Hunt is charismatic, he’s paid his dues, he’s wicked smart, he’s humble, he has a sense of humor and he seems to be a talented motivator.

But let’s pump the brakes on handing him the job.

Tweeters and bloggers have already started a campaign to make him go from interim coach to eternal coach. You know what? Most teams play hard for a new coach who takes over at midseason. Remember when George Karl took over in Denver? And it’s mid-March of a lost season and, as recent history tells us, it’s time for Kenneth Faried to start playing hard! And Hunt has his guys playing Karl ball — in other words, the same style management apparently didn’t want Denver playing in the postseason, which is a reason Denver fired Karl and hired Shaw in the first place.

Here’s what we do know: Hunt’s not a lemon. He should get a long look.

The big question is this: Would this franchise really decide to go with another first-time head coach after the Shaw debacle? The easy answer is no. The easy answer is Mike D’Antoni, and Denver should definitely interview the mustached maestro.

But the Nuggets’ front office shouldn’t rule out Hunt just because it whiffed on Shaw. Learn what went wrong with Shaw, but don’t assume that every first-time coach will be Shaw. I still say they should do everything they can to convince Chauncey Billups to coach. Above all, however, don’t let Hunt leave the building unless you truly believe you’ve found someone better.

Benjamin Hochman was a sports columnist for The Denver Post until August 2015 before leaving for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, his hometown newspaper. Hochman previously worked for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for its Hurricane Katrina coverage. Hochman wrote the Katrina-themed book “Fourth and New Orleans,” published in 2007.

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